Blodwen Davies was hardly alone in her suspicions that Thomson had not accidentally drowned. An article by Kenneth Wells in the Toronto Telegram on February 3, 1934, had broadly hinted at the possibility of foul play a year before Davies’ book appeared. And in the fall of 1944, nine years after her book was published and well after Martin Blecher’s death, Edwin C. Guillet published an essay strongly suggesting that Thomson was murdered. Dr. Guillet, a historian with the Ontario Department of Education, was a prolific writer, renowned for his fifty-volume series on famous Canadian trials. In his essay, called “The Death of Tom Thomson, Canadian Artist: A Study of the Evidence at the Coroner’s Inquest, 1917,” he concluded that, given the condition of the body when discovered, there were two potential causes of death: foul play or suicide “during temporary mental derangement.” He dismissed the notion that such an experienced canoeist and swimmer could ever have fallen from his canoe and simply drowned.
Guillet believed the four-inch bruise over the right temple—right, as Howland recorded, rather than left, as Robinson had noted—might have come from a blow struck by a stick, rock or paddle. The bleeding from the right ear he took as proof that it occurred before death, as corpses do not bleed. He cited a Thomson acquaintance, Jack Christie of Sundridge, as believing the artist had been murdered; however, he added: “The suicide possibility is not unreasonable, for Thomson is known to have been moody and morose at times, though usually when he was in the city, not in the wilds. Sudden derangement might have led to his diving from his canoe into shallow water and striking his head upon a rock, but it seems unlikely.”
Guillet mentioned Banting’s interest in the case and also wrote about a minor investigation conducted some time after Thomson’s death by Albert Henry Robson, Thomson’s former employer at Grip, who was unable to find definite proof but believed that “Thomson and a guide or forest ranger were in love with the same girl, possible a half-breed, and that through jealousy Thomson was murdered by his rival.” He found that Thomson’s fellow artists, people such as A.Y. Jackson, were “reticent to discuss the tragedy. The writer does not know whether this is entirely due to the weight of sad memories, or bears some relation to the mystery of his death. His family, too, while recognizing that there are serious discrepancies between the condition of Thomson’s body and the recorded cause of death, prefer that there be no resurrection of the issue at this late date.”
Guillet went no further in his published essay, but Neil Lehto, the Michigan lawyer, uncovered a typewritten postscript by Guillet in which he speaks of a “German-American” on the lake who is rather obviously Blecher, even if unnamed, and notes that the murder suggestion came from a conversation with A.Y. Jackson—most unusual, given that Jackson always seemed far more interested in downplaying such gossip than in promoting it.
Guillet’s theory, however, spins off base when he claims Thomson’s work as a guide that spring had cut into the earnings of this “German-American guide” and set the two against each other. He ignores the fact that there was precious little such work for Thomson in 1917, who took out his first guide’s licence that year and complained about the lack of tourists. The war had significantly reduced the number of visitors, and those who did arrive often had loyalty to the more established local guides. It was also a particularly virulent spring for blackflies—and, most significantly, Blecher never did guide in any capacity.
Still, Guillet notes that “The theory is that the two men met and that, during an altercation, Thomson was knocked from his canoe by a severe blow from a paddle.” A later addition says his subsequent investigations “all point to the same direction—that he was murdered. A guide who objected to his activities—for he was always in demand in that capacity—seems to have been responsible for his death; and opinion in the neighbourhood suggests that there was a love angle in the tragedy.”
Blecher was never actually named in print as the number one suspect until 1970, when William Little published The Tom Thomson Mystery. Little relied heavily on Mark Robinson’s journals and, significantly, on the later taped interviews with the ranger, who, as he grew older, became increasingly sure that Thomson had been done in by some assailant. By 1930, in correspondence with Blodwen Davies, Robinson had been blatantly suggestive: “You Might interview Martin and Bessie Blecher, but again be careful, they Possibly Know more about Tom’s sad end than any other Person.” If that isn’t a broad hint, what is?
Little took all these ingredients—the drinking and supposed confrontation at the Saturday night party, the hint of a love triangle, the sordid details concerning the condition of the body—and constructed a scenario. He concluded that Thomson was struck and killed with his own paddle while preparing to portage to Gill Lake—which explains why his working paddle was never found—and that Thomson’s assailant had weighted the body down by tying one leg to something heavy, using fishing line, then dumping the body and canoe off Little Wapomeo Island. When Dr. Howland’s daughter snagged something the evening before the body surfaced, the yanking motion dislodged the body and allowed it to break free of the weights and surface.
Little, who did much admirable research for his book, settled easily on Blecher as the culprit. “Martin Bletcher was considered a bad-tempered man,” he wrote, “a condition not improved by his heavy drinking. He was alleged to have been staying long periods of time in Canada to avoid involvement in the American war effort.” Little’s reliance on Mark Robinson is total: as mentioned, Robinson had become convinced that Blecher was a German spy and he also claimed that a U.S. agent had travelled to Canoe Lake looking into Blecher’s situation, leaving the distinct impression that Blecher was a draft dodger.
“Mark was not known to embellish or distort facts,” Little wrote, though many a Taylor Statten Camps graduate who had once sat around the bonfires listening to the highly respected ranger weave his stories would argue that much of Mark’s considerable charm was found in his ability to string out a story.
Little seized, rightly, on the relationship between Tom and Winnie as being important in understanding what might have happened. He then sought to tie in Blecher. “Did Martin Bletcher resent Tom’s visits to Winnie Trainor, just next door to him, during those summer evenings?” he asked.
“Did Tom resent Martin’s presence so close to Miss Trainor’s cottage?
“Had anything ever been said between them, or had the resentment lain beneath the surface, awaiting the inevitable final provocation?”
Little remained convinced that the suspect he had named was the killer of Tom Thomson. To Little’s credit, he did much to convince the curious that this was far more likely a case of murder than one of accident or suicide, but the curious increasingly began to wonder if perhaps the perpetrator was someone other than Blecher. Even Mark Robinson’s daughter, Ottelyn Addison, came to believe that her father’s suspicions and Little’s conviction were off track. “It’s gone through my mind more than once,” she told me, “that Little’s got the wrong man in Martin Blecher.”
Peter Webb of the University of Ottawa argued in a 2004 essay that Blecher was a suspect of convenience. In “Martin Blecher: Tom Thomson’s Murderer or Victim of Wartime Prejudice?” he wrote that Blecher would have been an obvious target of suspicion, given the extreme prejudice against Germans and also the testiness against Americans who were still balking at engagement in a war in which most Canadians believed American help was needed. The War Measures Act had already revoked many rights for Canadians of German descent, and Germans were required to register with regional offices. German Canadians could not vote or carry arms. A German American, by extension, might be held in even more suspicion.
The prejudice was so strong that Webb concluded Blecher was also a victim in the Thomson tragedy. Blecher, it would turn out, was not quite the draft dodger the small Canoe Lake community had presumed he was. U.S. war records established that Martin H. Blecher, Jr., of Buffalo, New York, “registered on November 27, 1917” and was ordered to report on August 24, 19
18. When he failed to report, he was declared a “deserter,” but later the so-called desertion was found to be “nonwilful” and he was discharged from the service without punishment. No explanation was offered for the reason he first failed to report, though it was more than a year after Thomson’s death. Furthermore, there was never any hint or gossip that Martin Blecher, Jr., and Winnifred Trainor had been involved with each other. And, similarly, there had never been any evidence that Blecher viewed Thomson as a rival in matters of the heart.
Though there might have been some doubt, following the publication of Little’s book, as to who might have killed Tom Thomson, it was from that point on widely accepted that Thomson had indeed been murdered. Little even quoted Irene Ewing, who was still a friend of the Trainor family, as saying, “I truly believe … Tom was done away with (do not like the word murdered)—but for what purpose I do not know.”
There are any number of theories—some persuasive, some dubious, a few positively wild—concerning Thomson’s death. It was said that he had come upon some “German operatives” along the portage and been dispatched by the spies to protect their espionage as they tracked troop trains passing through Algonquin Park from the West. (A train had derailed near the Joe Lake bridge in 1916, with no injuries, and some were convinced it was the work of saboteurs hoping to destroy a troop train.) It was also suggested that Tom might have run into poachers who killed him, rather than lose their valuable pelts. And, of course, there was the theory that he had fallen and struck his head on a rock near the portage entrance and drifted out into deeper water in the light wind blowing that day—or that he’d simply fallen out of his canoe because he was drunk. Blodwen Davies thought someone had met him on the lake and knocked him out with a single blow of a paddle blade. Judge Little thought Martin Blecher, Jr., had lain in wait for Thomson and either shot him in the temple or struck him a fatal blow. David Silcox and Harold Town put forward the theory that Thomson had stood in his canoe to pee and fallen and struck his head on the point of the stern.
People have explained the fishing line found wrapped around Thomson’s ankle as evidence that a murderer had weighted down the body or that Thomson had been treating his own sprained ankle. Again, we enter the region of the preposterous here. No one had noted Thomson favouring an injured ankle. Plenty of witnesses saw him walking about in the days before he went missing and did not mention a limp. Nor would any woodsman treat an injured ankle in such a fashion unless he hoped to give himself gangrene poisoning. If Thomson had wrapped the fishing line around his ankle to hold a splint in place, as others have suggested, the splint would still have been in place, given that Mark Robinson had to use a knife to cut away the line. And while it is always possible that the line was twisted onto his ankle by the rolling of Thomson’s body, it was only around the one ankle and, in Robinson’s recollection, seemed deliberately and carefully wound. This makes it highly unlikely that his ankle became entangled in the line while he was at the bottom of Canoe Lake.
One intriguing theory as to how the line came to be wrapped around the ankle is found in a Discovery Kids television program, Mystery Hunters, and in a 2002 article by S. Bernard Shaw in Country Connections magazine. Shaw suggests that Thomson might have been killed by a whirlwind that suddenly picked him and his canoe out of Canoe Lake waters and spun the artist like a windmill before dropping him, unconscious, back into the drink.
Shaw refers to a study by meteorologist Bernard A. Power, who saw a tourbillon on a Quebec lake and was fascinated by its power and brevity—a hissing wind sucked spray into its vortex for ten seconds or so, then instantly vanished. Power calculated that the wind force could have been enough to pick up a normal-sized man—in a hundred-mile-per-hour wind, the centrifugal force would be two hundred times the force of gravity. Thomson could have been surprised by one of these instant whirlwinds and spun in the air while fishing line wrapped about his ankle and his twirling paddle clipped him on the head. The G-force power of the vortex could even have caused the noted mysterious subsequent bleeding from the ear. Unconscious, Thomson would then have been dropped back into the water to drown while the whirlwind simply vanished, leaving behind no evidence that it had ever occurred. Shaw provides past examples of such instant whirlwinds, including two on Algonquin’s Lake Opeongo, and suggests that, in addition to the ones noted, “there are the ones unseen and unreported—like, perhaps, the one that killed Tom Thomson.”
The problem with this fascinating theory is that Canoe Lake was relatively populated in those days, particularly in mid-July. That something so dramatic could have happened and not be noticed is unlikely. Meteorologist Phil Chadwick is highly doubtful about the waterspout theory. “I am a big enthusiast of the power of nature,” Chadwick says, but he cannot see how the necessary conditions would have been present on the cool, damp day that Thomson went missing. Waterspouts are usually caused by cold air moving over much warmer water, and, Chadwick adds, they’re “most common in the fall of the year in the wake of an Arctic cold front.” Such was not the case in early July 1917. Nor does Chadwick believe that a tornado would be possible, as “There was no mention of any severe weather in any of the many climate reports taken on July 8, 1917.”
The suicide theory first put out in whispers by Shannon Fraser has often been dismissed as improbable, given the successes Thomson had had just before his death. David Silcox considered suicide “the most unlikely possibility” in that “Thomson’s frame of mind, his melancholy days notwithstanding, was very positive.” Neil Lehto, however, strongly endorsed the suicide possibility in Algonquin Elegy, published in 2005. Lehto became fascinated by the number of times those who knew Thomson spoke of his moods or his sometimes manic drive to paint. “Tom’s moods seemed to react according to the weather,” Irene Ewing had said of the artist she met when she was twelve. “When a storm was brewing he became restless and when the electric storm would be at its height—his eyes would glow.”
Lehto believes that Thomson had a mental condition, given that his friends said he “suffered fits of unreasonable despondency. Many described him as a creature of depression and ecstatic moments, his melancholy giving way to outbursts of great passion and energy during his travels, paintings, and bouts of heavy drinking. Today they would say he suffered from bipolar disorder or manic depression, a chronic and progressive mental illness that often ends in suicide if left untreated. Few biographers have dealt with this critical part of his story. It is irrefutable from what he did and what happened at Canoe Lake on July 8, 1917, that Tom was suffering from severe depression in the days before his drowning. All of the events preceding his death point to this sad conclusion.”
Lehto carefully lays down his evidence. Robinson had once said Thomson could be “jovial” one day and yet at “times he appeared melancholy and defeated in manner. At such times he would suddenly as it were awaken and be almost angry in appearance and action. It was at those times he did his best work.” Robinson’s observation is partly corroborated and partly called into question by Thomson’s employer at Grip, Albert Henry Robson. He left notes saying he once received a call from a previous employer of the artist “belittling Thomson as an erratic and difficult man in a department,” though Robson himself found this to be untrue and absurd: “Thomson was a most diligent, reliable and capable craftsman. Nothing seemed to disturb the even tenor of his way.”
Lehto gathers a litany of comments from Thomson’s artistic friends—Jackson saying Thomson had “fits of unreasonable despondency,” Lismer calling him “a creature of depression and ecstatic moments”—and says such comments run counter to the impression that the public has had of Thomson as a contented and successful man at the time of his death.
“Anyone acquainted with Thomson’s violent mood fluctuations and wild drinking would question the feelings of his friends,” Joan Murray wrote in Tom Thomson: The Last Spring. “His hell-raising, anarchic individualism may have been the side of a depressive personality. But his fellow artists did not kn
ow, it seems, his dark side, certainly they have not recorded it, and it appears only in the records of youthful companions.” In another instance, however, Murray argued that “any suspicion of Thomson’s death as suicide should be dispelled” by the series of sketches Thomson produced that final spring at Canoe Lake. “They are,” she wrote, “the best and most trenchant works the artist ever created, and are pervaded with a calm serenity and certitude of mood which no potential suicide could possibly capture.”
Lehto, intriguingly, uses precisely the same evidence—the incredible daily output of that final spring—as an argument for Thomson’s manic behaviour in his final weeks and proof that he was, at that time, suffering from bipolar disorder. He quotes from the seminal works of Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison of Johns Hopkins University, who has dealt herself with the manic depression that comes with such a disorder. “Cycles of fluctuating moods and energy levels serve as a background to constantly changing thoughts, behaviors, and feelings,” she wrote in 1993. “The illness encompasses the extremes of human experience. Thinking can range from florid psychosis or ‘madness’ to patterns of unusually clear, fast and creative associations … Behavior can be frenzied, expansive, bizarre, and seductive, or it can be seclusive, sluggish, and dangerously suicidal.”
Jamison makes much of the progression of the seasons as it pertains to the mental health of those suffering from bipolar disorder. She offers evidence that, throughout history, creative energies among artists of all sorts tend to peak in late spring and autumn. “So, too,” she writes, “the seasons have become metaphorical for life, and the creative process itself, its barren winters and hoped-for springs, and its mixed and disturbed seasons, so beautifully captured by T.S. Eliot.” Jamison offers an excerpt from Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the powerful last section of his famous Four Quartets:
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